A visitor standing between Jananne Al-Ani’s paired family photos, displayed on facing walls, might feel the gazes – direct, penetrating, even unnerving – of twin portraits of five women, variously dressed in black burkas and veils.

It’s the best place to start "She Who Tells A Story,’’ an often revealing exhibition of work by 12 Arabic and Iranian women photographers that just opened at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Caught in those gazes, a visitor might better understand how those photographers have attempted to reveal, debunk or subvert the stereotyped ways their Arabic sisters have been portrayed throughout several centuries of Western art.

Representing eight Middle Eastern countries, the artists in this first-of-a-kind exhibit work in eclectic styles ranging from portraiture to fine arts photography, from staged narratives to photojournalism.

Rania Matar of Brookline is showing young girls in their bedrooms in Lebanese homes and refugee camps, suggesting both the shared experiences of adolescence and the psychic cost of growing up amid conflict. Iranian Gohar Dashti restages a young couple’s honeymoon and marriage amid the debris of a battlefield.

A mother, daughter and the child’s doll gradually disappear into the anonymity of all-enshrouding burkas in Yemeni artist Boushra Almutawakel’s evocative photo series. Her feet, arms and face covered with Arabic calligraphy, a long-haired woman lies on a bed of spent bullet casings in a disturbingly beautiful photo by Lalla Essaydi, a Morocco native living in New York.

In many ways, Al-Ani’s photos challenge visitors to use these images as a springboard to look beyond their own expectations of Middle Eastern women.

Born in Iraq of an Iraqi father and Irish mother, Al-Ani is showing two 4-by-6-foot, untitled black-and-white photos of her mother, herself and her three sisters displayed 6 feet apart on facing walls. In a provocative reversal of traditional Muslim customs, the faces of the women in the photo, from right to left, are increasingly veiled while, going in the other direction, their knees are exposed.

Is Al-Ani challenging Islamic conventions of female modesty, spoofing Orientalist depictions of exotic women or forcing visitors to confront their own prejudices?

Opening just as searing news photos documenting hundreds of civilian deaths by nerve gas in Syria, this ambitious exhibit, subtitled "Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World,’’ conveys its subjects’ humanity and explores the complexities of often misunderstood cultures.

Organizer Kristen Gresh said the exhibit’s 100 photographs and two videos, mostly made over the last decade, "challenge stereotypes’’ and provide insights into political and social issues.

She took the exhibit’s title from the Arabic word "rawiya,’’ the name of a collective of six female photographers from the Middle East which means "She who tells a story."

"(T)he photographs in this exhibition challenge Western notions about the ‘Orient,’ examine the complexities of identity and redefine documentary as a genre,’’ said Gresh, who lived abroad for 15 years teaching the history of photography in Cairo and Paris.

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The Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh assistant curator of photographs, she chose the photographers for the show based on individual merit rather than trying to represent each country throughout the Middle East.

Three of the four artists who come from Iran still live there. Two are Egyptian and the others hail from Morocco, Yemen, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. One is a Palestinian who was born and lives in East Jerusalem. Several are Muslims but there are also photographs by Coptic Christians and Christians in the show.

Introducing the exhibit, Gresh wrote the photographers "provide insight into major political and social issues of a part of the world that is historically misrepresented and often misunderstood.’’

She has organized the exhibit thematically by dividing it into three sections: "Deconstructing Orientalism"; ""Constructing Identities; and "New Documentary." As used by art historians, Orientalism refers to a patronizing way of depicting the Middle East as exotic and backward while portraying women in submissive or sexualized ways.

With two exceptions, most artists in this show will not be well known.

Matar has exhibited her photos of life in her native Lebanon and images from her series, "A Girl in Her Room,’’ in Framingham, Lincoln, Watertown and other local venues. Now living in New York, Essaydi had a solo 2009 show at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.

Rather than choreograph their images, Egyptian Rana El Nemr and Jordanian Tanya Habjouqa photographed their mainly female subjects in urban settings that capture everyday life with an understated verisimilitude.

In her "Women of Gaza’’ series, Habjouqa photographs women, whose freedoms are constrained because they live in occupied territory, performing simple acts of freedom like having a picnic on a beach or performing aerobics in full-length burkas.

Born in East Jerusalem where she still lives, Palestinian Rula Halawani is showing a series of photos titled "Negative Incursions’’ which depict scenes from the 2002 Israeli invasion of the West Bank. While she’s photographed scenes of grieving people and outright carnage, Halawani prints her images as enlarged negatives that drain the immediacy of the action.

Visiting with her husband and son, a woman who had immigrated from Iraq nine years ago and only gave her name as Ghufran said many photos in the exhibit were "pretty and artistic’’ but "didn’t show regular peoples’ everyday lives.’’

"It’s an art show by women. That’s good,’’ said the woman, who lives in Winthrop. "But I don’t think it shows Americans what it’s really like back there.’’